Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an award winning artist, researcher, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is the Director of the Digital Humanities MA program and an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Networked Culture in the department of Journalism, Communication, and Theatre at Lehman College (City University of New York – CUNY).

He has taught as adjunct assistant professor at Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT) from 2010 to 2014. He has also taught in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development (2009, 2010, 2011). He has also taught at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) (2007, 2008), and Trinity College’s MsC in Interactive Digital Media (2003, 2004). From 2001-2004 he was a Research Fellow in the Human Connectedness Group at Media Lab Europe and from 2006-2007 he was an R&D OpenLab Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City. He received his Masters from ITP in 1999 and was an Interval Research Fellow from 1999-2001.

Jonah’s work and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks” which includes over 80 projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.

He is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group), recipient of the ARANEUM Prize sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Art, Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO, and was a 2006 and 2008 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellow Nominee. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome.org, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been presented at events and organizations such as DEAF (03,04), London Science Museum (2008), Future Sonic / Future Everything (2004, 2009), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09,12), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Tate Modern (03), Whitney Museum of American Art’s ArtPort (03, 12), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA – NYC)(2008),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008), and Palais Du Tokyo, Paris (2009). His work has been reported about in The Times, The New York Times, Wired News, Make, Boing Boing, El Pais, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Register, Slashdot, NY Post, The Wire, Rhizome, Crunch Gear, Beyond the Beyond, Neural, Liberation, Village Voice, IEEE Spectrum, The Age, Taschen Books, and more.

Molly Dilworth, 547 West 27th Street (2009). From the series "Paintings for Satellites."

In the early 2000s, as location-aware devices first became commonplace, there was a lot of hype surrounding their potential creative use by artists. However, over time, this initial enthusiasm for "locative media"--projects that respond to data or communications technologies that refer to particular sites--leveled off, even dissipated. Regardless of this drought, geospatial technologies are widely used, and play an important and often unnoticed role in conditioning many aspects of our existence. Responding to this condition of ubiquity, artists have continued to use locative technologies critically, opening up closed systems, making their effects visible, and reconfiguring our relationship with such systems.

A kind of cold weather antipode of summer's "Love Parade," the Transmediale 2014 media arts festival was a beacon of light in the long dusk of a Berlin winter. As a twist on the usual curated exhibition, this year's festival opted for an ad-hoc "Art Hack Day" (AHD) approach, where submitting artists were expected to create new and original artworks in the span of two days (and nights). Opening the exhibition with a more down-to-earth feel, AHD ultimately resembled a DIY, garage-style party instead of a highbrow exhibition space.

As the iPhone just celebrated its fifth year on the market, artists have already made a substantial dent in the commercially lucrative world of Apple’s AppStore. Despite this success, artists are still pushing forward to build apps that further integrate with the device’s sensors and location-based capabilities. Rather than working solely within the context of software art as I have covered in two previous articles on the subject for Rhizome, there is a focus now on artists who are interacting with the physical world by using the device’s internal sensors, location capabilities, constant Internet connectivity, and built-in cameras.

Using the camera as a sensor, “Konfetti” by German based designer Stephan Maximillian Huber visualizes the image of its subject into countless dots. In effect, the camera image is translated into virtual confetti that follows any movement and creates an ever changing images based on which camera is selected. The dot’s movement is correlated to the detected flow captured by the camera and by repelling other dots, which also move as you touch and drag them. Huber explains over email how the app works as a reflection based art tool. “The app started as an iPad-only app, and on an iPad the app acts like a mirror, showing an abstract reflection of yourself. You'll get a clear image of yourself only when you concentrate on the process of the app, and don't move too fast. It's like contemplating about yourself and the image of yourself. And as your thoughts and emotions aren't static the image the app generates is dynamic and adapts to minimal movements and new ...

In the summer of 2009, I wrote an article here at Rhizome about the burgeoning activities of media artists creating new works or updating versions of their older interactive screen-based projects for Apple's iPhone and iTouch mobile devices. As the article made its way throughout the blogosphere, comments surfaced ranging from criticism of the "closed world of Apple's App Store and iPhone devices" to a championing of the availability of inexpensive multi-touch technology now available to artists who had been waiting for a platform that could adequately display and allow for the type of interaction their projects demanded. A year after the article came out, the draw of these devices and their potentially expansive audience has become even more irresistible to artists enough so that several more "apps" have surfaced. The following article catalogs several new iPhone works which have emerged over the past year, works that are pioneering the next generation of portable media art.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, professor and writer. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5),Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008). He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development.

2009 was an important year for the Internet as a whole. The advent of web 2.0 and "crowdsourcing" initiatives has enabled a much richer array of content from users who might never have ventured onto the Internet in previous years. My top 10 sites for this year cover a wide range of topics from art made for mobile devices with iPhoneArt.org to evidence of both information saturation with Information Aesthetics and physical and pseudo intellectual abundance with This is Why You're Fat and There I Fixed It, to strange observances of mistakes in the public realm with Fail Blog. In addition to these crowdsourced content sites, I also see some ongoing potential with artist-created sites such as Brett Domino's lowtech approach to music making ...

IntroductionIf life were a game, LA based artist, Brody Condon, would probably be its designer. From recreating the political mess of the FBI's assault on David Koresh's Branch Davidian Complex with his C-Level collaboration, "Waco: Resurrection", to emphasizing the violence quotient of mainstream video games with "Adam Killer", Condon's work is both a reflection on the history of gaming and a cautionary realization of its future. His presence in next year's Whitney Biennial, "Velvet Strike", (created with fellow artists Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre), is a slap in the face to the hard-core gaming community. The online multi-player shooter subverts the death and destruction of "Counter-Strike", by allowing players to plaster graphics of peace symbols and anti-war slogans on the 3D walls. This year, one of Condon's students designed a game called "9-11 Survivor", a third person's victim's perspective of the tragic event that was eventually pulled offline for obvious reasons. If the future of gaming combines virtual and physical space with themes based on actual events, Condon might be leading the revolution. His work is a poignant, although sometimes upsetting vision of the merging of interactive entertainment, international media, and personal life experiences. What follows is an interview I conducted with Condon about his motives as an artist, academic, game designer, and pop culture enthusiast.

BC: I don't play games as much as I used to. I tend to be more interested in the elements that surround games and game culture. To some extent, most of the screen based games I consumed in the past, and continue to consume now, are forgettable. I suppose I am bitter about all the lost years of screen time. I could have been accomplishing something at least pseudo-productive. On a more positive note, I still love the pure aesthetic joy of watching the progression from one graphics generation to another. Forming a intuitive relationship with those images, and now having the ability to crack them open, rearrange, and play with those aesthetics and structures at this point through emulators, PC game modding, and console hacking, etc. is a blessing.

JBC: Are you satisfied with the state of games today? What would you change or leave the same?

BC: As happy as I am with movement of games and game culture into the mainstream, I somehow yearn for the days when being "the kid who could beat ANY game," was not exactly a badge of honor. It took a certain sense of fortitude to persist in your gaming hobby. It was dangerous to walk around your neighborhood on a weekend with a couple cartridges and an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition Player's Handbook under your arm. Little did the guy who came at me on the sidewalk know that D&D books could be used as weapons. Especially if stacked properly in a thin duffel bag and swung by the handles, they can become a sort of make-shift bludgeoning weapon. Years later I found out that guy had a father that committed suicide, then he broke his leg and dropped out of school at some point. Eventually after a party he wandered out to the highway and threw himself into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer. I'm not kidding.

JBC: Your work seems to be about emphasizing cliches found in games, especially the death scene in "Adam Killer". What is important about this topic and what has this approach taught you?

BC: I am interested in these cliched game play structures as a material. Whether it is a kid making images of his domestic environment juxtaposed with the trademark FPS hand and gun at the bottom of the image, or the concept of the "re-spawn", which contains interesting links to reincarnation and resurrection. Again, these cliches are also great cultural indicators. They represent and at the same time repetitively inform the emotions and psychology of the player. What does the empty shell of the character mesh, which has an interior constructed of "gibs", or small gut-like portions, that explode and replace the body mesh inform us about our current relationship with death and the interior of the body? Given the long history of representation of the body, I find this contemporary shift in those representations and the material they are created with a great site to dig for content. At the same time, it's a desperate attempt to work out the box that the consumption of those images have placed me in.

JBC: You also seem to focus on aggregating the connection between real life events and how these could or might be played out in gaming environments. Do you see game spaces as a logical extension of physical spaces or an antithesis? How do real events affect gaming and vice versa?

BC: Game spaces may be no more antithetical to, or extensions of, actual spaces than the perspective translation of 3-dimensional natural phenomena onto 2-dimensional surfaces in the 15th century. The tools have just been updated. A Cartesian grid with simulated perspective is the first thing I see when I open up my 3D modeling program. The crossover between level and environment design in games, and traditional architectural practice is obviously growing due the success of game environments that mimic reality. Scenarios like The Getaway, and True Crime Streets of LA are GTA3 knockoffs that take place in simulations London and LA are great examples. This simulation of a city's architecture and urban planning has the ability to alter the perception of the city to those that live in and outside the city, possibly as much as the actual physical site. What also interests me are the subtle differences in the game version, the easy rearrangement of structures and streets to fit game play scenarios. On the other hand, I feel like architecture has taken these environments too lightly. Especially fantasy environments are discarded as only an aesthetic surface, and not as inspiration for new structures and patterns of movement through them. Imagine constructed spaces inspired by the idea of going downtown to your bank, jumping from platform to platform, to reach your ATM located in a floating Necropolis of the Undead Scourge from Warcraft III.

JBC: Is there anything a game can't emulate? What are the main problems in games today? What are they missing and what are they failing at?

BC: There are a horde of problems. I suppose targeting problematic issues in gaming depends on what angle you are concerned with, cultural implications, business strategies, game dev education, etc. However, the core problem is not located within games, it is the lack of any substantial media literacy dialogue within the public school education system in the states. Not to mention the current information bubble that surrounds us here like an invisible shield.

JBC: Are people who play games (such as hardcore gamers) interested in your work? Who plays your games and how are they affected?

BC: [My] work has been labeled "Gayer than actual gay people." by the online gaming community. In this case it was specifically about the work "Velvet-Strike" that I contributed to. We (Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre) also received near death threats and other fun comments such as:

----- Original Message ----->>Subject: Velvet-Strike... POINTLESS!>>>>Hi,>>I wanted to say I don't support YOUR stupid little brigade to create>>peace and love and shit like that, face it its just POINTLESS BULLSHIT!>>If you think that you can actually stop hate, then you're just a fucking>>moron, it's like trying to say that the DEA will actually stop drug>>trafficking. Those two things will never be stopped. Human nature is to>>hate the enemy. And another thing don't flood are fucking games with this>>"LOVEY DOVEY BULLSHIT!" I almost hate you people more than my enemies. So>>one last thing, If you and your queer little hippy friends don't like>>America, then FUCKING LEAVE! GO FUCK UP CANADA OR SOMETHING!!!>> - Sincerely, your worst enemy--------------------------------

Otherwise, I think any direct and positive relationship with the actual game development community has been fairly non-existent, and mostly relegated to the traditional and media art circuit. However, now that we have made the jump from modifying and hacking existing games to using middleware game engines, there is more industry crossover in a playable piece I recently worked on like Waco: Resurrection ( www.waco.c-level.cc ). However, I should say I've ran into developers and gamers that love the work. It is really such a broad range of individuals that make up the industry and consumer base. Either way, a vernacular dialogue has been started on the ground. Debates are flowing in the game community blogs and forums, at game industry conferences, and among the general public concerning the relationship of games to culture, and the alternative possibilities for game development outside of escapist fantasy narratives and sports simulations.

JBC: Do you think there is a connection between reality TV and gaming?

BC: Hard to say, I have never watched a reality TV show from start to finish. Living in LA, you can sort of throw a stick and find someone who knows about these things, so I just went outside and asked my landlord this question. Him and his wife were contestants on that early reality show, The Amazing Race. He never played games, so we were stuck on this one. However, he did say that the show broke up his marriage, and that those shows are fixed.

JBC: What is your opinion on pervasive gaming? Do you think it's a genre that could succeed and become mainstream like PC, Massively multi-Player Online Games (MMOG), and console games? (When I say "pervasive gaming", I am referring to projects like Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now?" and It's Alive's "BotFighters". Games that mix digital and real spaces.)

BC: I'm not in the business of prophesizing successful tech, but I checked out Blast Theory's website, and they seem to be having a good time running around in those cool workout-suits with all that nifty PDA gear on them. I'm all for it. As far as the cell phone "pervasive" gaming is concerned, there is such a different relationship with cell phone technology there (UK). I can't imagine how that would go over with a consumer in the US. A car ran over my cell phone and it gives me a headache whenever I use it. I recently spent some time at a SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event where hundreds of people gathered in the desert for a week of heavily immersive medieval reenactment. True "pervasive" gaming, at these events there are regular battles of hundreds of individuals in homemade armor beating the hell out of each other with sticks in regimented battles. There are bridge battles, castle sieges, etc. The most interesting intersection with screen-based gaming is their incorporation of "Capture the Flag", and "Resurrection" game play structures.

IntroductionIf life were a game, LA based artist, Brody Condon, would probably be its designer. From recreating the political mess of the FBI's assault on David Koresh's Branch Davidian Complex with his C-Level collaboration, "Waco: Resurrection", to emphasizing the violence quotient of mainstream video games with "Adam Killer", Condon's work is both a reflection on the history of gaming and a cautionary realization of its future. His presence in next year's Whitney Biennial, "Velvet Strike", (created with fellow artists Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre), is a slap in the face to the hard-core gaming community. The online multi-player shooter subverts the death and destruction of "Counter-Strike", by allowing players to plaster graphics of peace symbols and anti-war slogans on the 3D walls. This year, one of Condon's students designed a game called "9-11 Survivor", a third person's victim's perspective of the tragic event that was eventually pulled offline for obvious reasons. If the future of gaming combines virtual and physical space with themes based on actual events, Condon might be leading the revolution. His work is a poignant, although sometimes upsetting vision of the merging of interactive entertainment, international media, and personal life experiences. What follows is an interview I conducted with Condon about his motives as an artist, academic, game designer, and pop culture enthusiast.

BC: I don't play games as much as I used to. I tend to be more interested in the elements that surround games and game culture. To some extent, most of the screen based games I consumed in the past, and continue to consume now, are forgettable. I suppose I am bitter about all the lost years of screen time. I could have been accomplishing something at least pseudo-productive. On a more positive note, I still love the pure aesthetic joy of watching the progression from one graphics generation to another. Forming a intuitive relationship with those images, and now having the ability to crack them open, rearrange, and play with those aesthetics and structures at this point through emulators, PC game modding, and console hacking, etc. is a blessing.

JBC: Are you satisfied with the state of games today? What would you change or leave the same?

BC: As happy as I am with movement of games and game culture into the mainstream, I somehow yearn for the days when being "the kid who could beat ANY game," was not exactly a badge of honor. It took a certain sense of fortitude to persist in your gaming hobby. It was dangerous to walk around your neighborhood on a weekend with a couple cartridges and an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition Player's Handbook under your arm. Little did the guy who came at me on the sidewalk know that D&D books could be used as weapons. Especially if stacked properly in a thin duffel bag and swung by the handles, they can become a sort of make-shift bludgeoning weapon. Years later I found out that guy had a father that committed suicide, then he broke his leg and dropped out of school at some point. Eventually after a party he wandered out to the highway and threw himself into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer. I'm not kidding.

JBC: Your work seems to be about emphasizing cliches found in games, especially the death scene in "Adam Killer". What is important about this topic and what has this approach taught you?

BC: I am interested in these cliched game play structures as a material. Whether it is a kid making images of his domestic environment juxtaposed with the trademark FPS hand and gun at the bottom of the image, or the concept of the "re-spawn", which contains interesting links to reincarnation and resurrection. Again, these cliches are also great cultural indicators. They represent and at the same time repetitively inform the emotions and psychology of the player. What does the empty shell of the character mesh, which has an interior constructed of "gibs", or small gut-like portions, that explode and replace the body mesh inform us about our current relationship with death and the interior of the body? Given the long history of representation of the body, I find this contemporary shift in those representations and the material they are created with a great site to dig for content. At the same time, it's a desperate attempt to work out the box that the consumption of those images have placed me in.

JBC: You also seem to focus on aggregating the connection between real life events and how these could or might be played out in gaming environments. Do you see game spaces as a logical extension of physical spaces or an antithesis? How do real events affect gaming and vice versa?

BC: Game spaces may be no more antithetical to, or extensions of, actual spaces than the perspective translation of 3-dimensional natural phenomena onto 2-dimensional surfaces in the 15th century. The tools have just been updated. A Cartesian grid with simulated perspective is the first thing I see when I open up my 3D modeling program. The crossover between level and environment design in games, and traditional architectural practice is obviously growing due the success of game environments that mimic reality. Scenarios like The Getaway, and True Crime Streets of LA are GTA3 knockoffs that take place in simulations London and LA are great examples. This simulation of a city's architecture and urban planning has the ability to alter the perception of the city to those that live in and outside the city, possibly as much as the actual physical site. What also interests me are the subtle differences in the game version, the easy rearrangement of structures and streets to fit game play scenarios. On the other hand, I feel like architecture has taken these environments too lightly. Especially fantasy environments are discarded as only an aesthetic surface, and not as inspiration for new structures and patterns of movement through them. Imagine constructed spaces inspired by the idea of going downtown to your bank, jumping from platform to platform, to reach your ATM located in a floating Necropolis of the Undead Scourge from Warcraft III.

JBC: Is there anything a game can't emulate? What are the main problems in games today? What are they missing and what are they failing at?

BC: There are a horde of problems. I suppose targeting problematic issues in gaming depends on what angle you are concerned with, cultural implications, business strategies, game dev education, etc. However, the core problem is not located within games, it is the lack of any substantial media literacy dialogue within the public school education system in the states. Not to mention the current information bubble that surrounds us here like an invisible shield.

JBC: Are people who play games (such as hardcore gamers) interested in your work? Who plays your games and how are they affected?

BC: [My] work has been labeled "Gayer than actual gay people." by the online gaming community. In this case it was specifically about the work "Velvet-Strike" that I contributed to. We (Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre) also received near death threats and other fun comments such as:

----- Original Message ----->>Subject: Velvet-Strike... POINTLESS!>>>>Hi,>>I wanted to say I don't support YOUR stupid little brigade to create>>peace and love and shit like that, face it its just POINTLESS BULLSHIT!>>If you think that you can actually stop hate, then you're just a fucking>>moron, it's like trying to say that the DEA will actually stop drug>>trafficking. Those two things will never be stopped. Human nature is to>>hate the enemy. And another thing don't flood are fucking games with this>>"LOVEY DOVEY BULLSHIT!" I almost hate you people more than my enemies. So>>one last thing, If you and your queer little hippy friends don't like>>America, then FUCKING LEAVE! GO FUCK UP CANADA OR SOMETHING!!!>> - Sincerely, your worst enemy--------------------------------

Otherwise, I think any direct and positive relationship with the actual game development community has been fairly non-existent, and mostly relegated to the traditional and media art circuit. However, now that we have made the jump from modifying and hacking existing games to using middleware game engines, there is more industry crossover in a playable piece I recently worked on like Waco: Resurrection ( www.waco.c-level.cc ). However, I should say I've ran into developers and gamers that love the work. It is really such a broad range of individuals that make up the industry and consumer base. Either way, a vernacular dialogue has been started on the ground. Debates are flowing in the game community blogs and forums, at game industry conferences, and among the general public concerning the relationship of games to culture, and the alternative possibilities for game development outside of escapist fantasy narratives and sports simulations.

JBC: Do you think there is a connection between reality TV and gaming?

BC: Hard to say, I have never watched a reality TV show from start to finish. Living in LA, you can sort of throw a stick and find someone who knows about these things, so I just went outside and asked my landlord this question. Him and his wife were contestants on that early reality show, The Amazing Race. He never played games, so we were stuck on this one. However, he did say that the show broke up his marriage, and that those shows are fixed.

JBC: What is your opinion on pervasive gaming? Do you think it's a genre that could succeed and become mainstream like PC, Massively multi-Player Online Games (MMOG), and console games? (When I say "pervasive gaming", I am referring to projects like Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now?" and It's Alive's "BotFighters". Games that mix digital and real spaces.)

BC: I'm not in the business of prophesizing successful tech, but I checked out Blast Theory's website, and they seem to be having a good time running around in those cool workout-suits with all that nifty PDA gear on them. I'm all for it. As far as the cell phone "pervasive" gaming is concerned, there is such a different relationship with cell phone technology there (UK). I can't imagine how that would go over with a consumer in the US. A car ran over my cell phone and it gives me a headache whenever I use it. I recently spent some time at a SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event where hundreds of people gathered in the desert for a week of heavily immersive medieval reenactment. True "pervasive" gaming, at these events there are regular battles of hundreds of individuals in homemade armor beating the hell out of each other with sticks in regimented battles. There are bridge battles, castle sieges, etc. The most interesting intersection with screen-based gaming is their incorporation of "Capture the Flag", and "Resurrection" game play structures.

IntroductionA few months ago, I wrote a Net Art News for Rhizome about LA based artist Angie Waller's project: "Data Mining the Amazon". The project (released as a book available from Waller's website) catalogs and graphs relationships between books customers bought on Amazon.com and music CDs purchased by users with similar tastes. Waller's approach adds a political slant by profiling relationships between liberal and conservative titles, popular books among the US military, and profiles on world leaders such as George W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher. Her aim is to repurpose a supposedly helpful customer service into a window of collective reflection on popular culture and values. The project also asks how media and commercial trends disseminate into public opinion through both national and global outlets like Amazon.com. My main interest in Waller's work comes from the focus on subverting networks from one purpose to another by using existing information to draw new types of correlations and reactions. Below is an interview I conducted with Waller about the project and her motivation as an artist, avid consumer, and data cartographer.

JBC: How did you start the "Data Mining the Amazon" project? What was the impetus?

AW: I started data mining Amazon.com as a loyal customer. I am a sucker for e-shopping and I never checkout with only one item. As a frequent shopper, I started to develop a very specialized home page on the site. I became more and more interested in the movies and CDs recommended to me based on my purchase history of art theory and computer programming books. One day a friend and I were talking about some band she had never heard of and I described them by saying "if you like band x and band y you might like band z." She knew instantly what I was referring to, and I realized that Amazon.com had become a huge influence on my vocabulary.

JBC: Your work seems to pick out cultural memes and play around with them. Is this intentional or do you see it fitting into a larger exploration? If so, what?

AW: I think the next morning I woke up with the idea to hit the political memes. Aesthetics and culture used to be of high importance in the political sphere, but these days we are being led by philistines. As an artist, I have a problem with that. Exploring Amazon became an easy way to relieve some of the tension.

Popular culture such as movies and CDs are the strongest cultural arena and I was excited to find associations between pop culture and books that described a specific political ideology. Although we all consume a lot of the same popular culture it is also a way to describe our aesthetic tastes. It is a bit of a teenager mentality when looking over your friend's CD collection. But there is still some truth in what type of person listens to what types of things.

JBC: The political angle of the piece is really striking since most people would probably overlook these connections. Why did you focus on political icons vs. any other types of relationships?

AW: After the last election between Bush and Gore, it seemed like the party lines were fading together. The Bush and Gore debate became more about their personalities and presentation. During that climate, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to startpin-pointing the differences between democrats and republicans based on the types of music they listen to. I am sure the Amazon database it not the most diverse sampling, but it couldn't be inferior to the election polls we are already accustomed to.

JBC: What was surprising or unexpected about the results you found?

AW: At first I had a few surprises. I was surprised that books about military battles and corporate takeovers pointed to the soothing CDs of Enya and Sarah Brightman. But, on second thought, it was not so unusual. I also enjoyed the eerie specificity with some of the bigger figures like Hitler and Mao Tse Tung.

JBC: Did you find that people who saw your correlations were surprised by the connections? If so why?

AW: A lot of people use the charts to see if they fit one profile or the other which can be entertaining. A lot of people look for truth in the information and are defensive when they see what music they are "supposed" to like. Then the charts become about profiling and how none of us really make a perfect fit even though companies place a lot of importance on this information.

I have taken a passive attitude towards companies profiling me. Sometimes I buy things because they were recommended to me. Sometimes I fantasize that the schizophrenic profile I created is triggering a flashing red light at some corporate headquarters causing a database shutdown and an internal investigation. I probably suffer a little paranoia.

JBC: Why should people be interested in your findings?

AW: People should be interested in my book because we would all love to know what George W. has in his CD collection. It creates the opportunity for consumers to profile leaders in a similar way we are profiled as voters.

JBC: I know this is an older piece, but what (if any) future directions could this work take?

AW: Maybe companies like Amazon will have more fun with the free associations that their database provides. I see an excellent dating service on their horizon. On a grander scale, maybe our current administration will make their tastes public knowledge. I would love to know what they are reading, listening to, watching and if there are any artists they like.

Personally, I am only visiting Amazon to shop these days. My art work has a tendency to use tools against their original intentions in search of greater things. I am sure another database project is on the distant horizon. The book will be different things over time. It is my first publication and I like that it will not be outmoded by technological progress. I am certain it will always be interesting to look at, it gives an unmediated look at the political climate of 2001-2002 with a popular music twist.

About:SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that relies on audience participation through input from their mobile phones. The project focuses on connecting people in shared spaces by attempting to merge distributed devices with creative and collaborative experience. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input from participants as essential to the overall output. The result is a public, shared performance where audience members interact by sending SMS, voice, or through a web-based text input to a central server from their input devices.

These messages are then dynamically mixed, cut, parsed, and spliced to influence and change the visual and audio output. These communications are also run through a speech synthesizer and a picture synthesizer. The incoming images and text are dynamically mixed according to specified rule sets such as pixel values, length of text, specified keywords, and inherent meanings.

Support/Sponsors:SimpleTEXT is a collaboration between Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Tim Redfern. It is commissioned, sponsored and funded by Low-Fi, a new media arts organization and collective based in London, UK.

Although adding the letter "e" to words like "culture" might seem a bit too 90s, the 2nd E-Culture Fair (first was in 2000) lived up to its name as a comprehensive showcase of over 50 projects, experiences, and performances that combined the virtual and physical. The fair, which took place in Amsterdam, was spread over several venues into three distinct categories including "My-Mode" (wearable technology and fashion), "Mobile Home" (networks at home and dispersed in urban settings), and "Toys4Us" (gaming and playful interfaces). This fair's theme centered on "Research and Development" in new media and took a hands-on approach to showing work with an eclectic mixture of live demos and events. Despite the potential brain overload, I managed to tour most of the venues and even sit in on several project presentations.

Walking into the newly renovated Paradiso theatre, My-Mode resembled a hybrid fashion show turned trade fair. The setup consisted of a wide range of fashion tech hybrids that emphasized the integration of technology on the body in everything from fabric design to reactive clothing. Taking a playful approach to adverse weather conditions was Elise Co's "Puddle Jumper", a raincoat with electro-luminescent panels that lit up when water fell on the coat. Also on display was International Fashion Machines' "Electric Plaid", a panel of interwoven conductive thread and silk-screened thermochromic inks that slowly changed colors when electricity was applied to the thread. This demoed solid technological know-how, but less interesting implementation other than some sewn light switches and pretty wall mounts. On the more practical side was "Inside/Outside", a series of networked handbags that measure localized pollution (smoke, audio, exhaust, etcS) and connect to each other over an ad-hoc (or spontaneous) network to exchange data and aggregate a diary of exposure levels over time. Focusing on biometric feedback was Sompit Moi Fusakul's "Interactive Ornaments: Emotions in Motions" which measured the wearer's heart rate and transposed this result on kinetic and illuminated jewelry. Also included was Jenny Tillotson's "Smart Second Skin", a dress that emits odors depending on biometric feedback from the wearer. I got really close and out came a Whiskey smell which means that either I remind people of drinking or the day was getting too long.

Despite the wide array of perspectives presented in MyMode, there seems to be a continual emphasis on cause and effect relationships with wearable technology. Something happens in the environment, space or activity the wearer is engaged and the clothing or device acts as a display or highlights these actions. The next step might be to look at reciprocal relationships between the object and the wearer where each plays a crucial role in each other's development and output over time. Is it possible to create objects and clothing that are not only aware of their inhabitants, but also of each other?

Spread over DeBalie and Melkweg venues, the "Mobile Home" theme displayed projects that featured fixed technologies for interacting in both public and private space. Victor Vina and Hector Serrano's "NetObjects", were a quirky collection of networked household objects including an umbrella that relays weather reports and a koo-koo clock that displays headlines from rightist and leftist newspapers. Another experiment in connected familiar spaces, the "Remote Home" featured networked furniture in each building, where sitting on a couch would trigger a linked couch to boot off the person sitting in the other space. Despite the playful interplay with the furniture, questions arose as to the importance of transposing identity as well as presence across distance? If you are unsure that the ambient display is outputting the movements of your significant other, does that cause more anxiety than reassurance?

Escaping the confines of indoor space, wireless-based projects seemed to pervade the fair. Delivering mobile wireless hotspots was Shu Lea Chang's "RICHAIR", featuring three wired up roller skate girls carrying mobile 802.11b repeaters and mini-computers with embedded webcams for relaying network connections and images across town. There was also an emphasis on the social impact of technology through Doors East's "Mapping Mobile Phone Usage Among Auto Rickshaw Drivers", a project examining the changes mobile technology has had in Bangalore, India for taxi drivers. The main implementation would be to create a mobile phone booth by integrating a pay system into cell phones integrated into the rickshaws. Finally, Marc Tuters' "Geograffiti" project envisions a future of collaborative cartography based on localized information exchange where public 'digital' space is annotated with graffiti.

Moving onto the playful side of technology, the "Toys4Us" exhibit looked at everything from collaborative DJ scratching and virtual puppetry to public installations of shared stories. Marcus Kirsch's "Rashomon" pit video capture with Street Fighter gaming where visitors' kicking and punching moves were captured and imported as game characters into a two-player fighting match. Also integrating public input was Merel Mirage's "Holy", a networked vending machine with an embedded LCD screen that allowed visitors to www.holy.nl to author animations and send them to the display. Also STEIM showed up with some impressive MIDI instruments and sound experiences including a pair of headphones with tilt sensors that sped up beats-per-minute on the audio depending on how fast you shook your head.

After two full days of demos and talks, questions arose as to the cyclical nature of information and interface design. On one hand there is a trend to build interfaces that encourage social interaction, but there's also a tendency to create experiences that discourage chance occurrences by highlighting personal experience. There should be a way to balance experiential design so that it not only allows for collaboration but also maintains an ambient presence that blends seamlessly into everyday activity. This was evident in some of the projects at the fair, but most had trouble escaping their categorization. Nevertheless, events like the E-Culture Fair are great for encouraging cross-pollination of research and practice along with showcasing the current state of the field. By emphasizing interactivity and the participatory nature of projects, the event had a distinct science fair-like atmosphere. This approach succeeded in presenting not only the latest gadgets and whimsical interfaces to come, but also the experience of participating in this landscape.